Artificial Intelligence in Smart Logistics Cyber-Physical Systems: State-of-The-Arts and Potential Applications

Logistics creates tremendous economic value through supporting the trading of goods between firms and customers, thereby improving the welfare of the society. In order to continuously improve the quality of logistics service, a great variety of cyber-physical techniques have been utilized in the modern logistics systems, which help tackle the grand challenges in multiple aspects including time efficiency, economic cost, safety risk and cyber-security. The fast development of artificial intelligence (AI) has gained significant popularity and success in various domains, and hence, it has been adopted to construct high-quality solutions that can facilitate the monitoring, operation and decision in logistics systems. Furthermore, the deployment of advanced sensoring and computing components forms a cyber-physical system (CPS) infrastructure, which promotes the capability and scalability on data acquisition, transmission, storage and processing, thereby enabling the further penetration of AI technologies. Based on the existing advances, this article is devoted to conducting a comprehensive survey of the AI applications in the modern logistics CPSs. In specific, we focus on the AI-based research and industrial solutions that can improve the time/economic efficiency, safety and cyber-security of logistics systems. The potential applications of AI to tackle the remaining challenges are also discussed to investigate the way to continuously improving the quality of logistics service.